And just look at how the package arrived. So adorable! They even sent a tiny elephant for baby!

I had to wait until the next morning to use the Gender Prediction Test because it requires the use of first morning urine for the best results, but I tried the elasti-oil the same day I got it. I have no idea if it will actually keep those dreaded stretch marks away (here’s hoping!), but I already like it better than that blah cocoa butter lotion. The elasti-oil is a therapeutic, aromatherapy massage oil. I heated the bottle in hot water according to the instructions, so the oil was warm and silky when I applied it and it smells like an absolute dream.

I did the Gender Prediction Test the next morning. The test can be taken as early as 10 weeks into a pregnancy, and I was at 15 weeks when I took it.

The test was easy to use and being the POAS queen that I am, I loved the opportunity to once again crate a makeshift science lab in my bathroom.

So, according to the IntelliGender test, I am having a…

Another boy?! Oh, say it isn’t so!

According to IntelliGender, the test is 82% accurate. We still have another month to go before we find out if the test has predicted correctly. We will have to wait and see…

In the meantime, the test has made the wait for the big ultrasound much more interesting. It was an exciting experience to have during the pregnancy.

I have been trying for the past few months to figure out the sex of this new baby.

So far, here is how the guessing games have been going:

•Hubby swears it’s a boy. He says that he has accepted our fate, and like his parents, we will only have boys. (He’s 1 of 4 boys in his family). Hubby also predicted that our last two children would be girls, and they weren’t. Hubby is always wrong.

•My grandmother says that it is a girl. She predicted both the boys would be boys and she has only been wrong once in her entire life (as far as guessing babies’ gender). She thought my mom was having a boy and a girl when she had my twin sisters and they ended up both being girls. Other than that, she has always been right.

•The Chinese Birth Calendar predicts that it is a girl. The calendar was right about my first son but wrong for my second son. Up to this point, it’s been about 50% accurate. Hold on…I think I have a coin somewhere around here that we can toss.

•The baby’s heartbeat was 150 at our last visit. Apparently, anything over 140 is a girl and anything under is a boy. This actually worked for my first pregnancy. The first time my doctor listened to his heartbeat with the Doppler, he said “It sounds like a boy”, and he was right. Bronx had a heart rate of 144 bpm when I was 22 weeks, but that was during an E.R. visit when I was having contractions and complications from a low-lying placenta. I’m thinking the contractions could have caused him to have a more rapid heart rate than he normally would have, which means his normal rate may have been lower than 140 bpm. Hmm…

•The nurse at my first OB visit this time around says that she thinks we are having a girl. She told me that for people who have two of one sex, the third is different about half the time. She said she is pretty confident that we will be in that lucky half. She also said that she has been right an awful lot lately.

•I am still on the fence. I really have no idea what the baby will be. Some things are different this time around, though. I have had food aversions with this pregnancy, something I never had with the boys. I also have determined that according to the Shuttles method, our timeline for conception is actually consistent with producing a girl . Both of the boys were conceived on the day of ovulation using a fertility monitor, so the Shuttles method was true with them.

I’m not even bothering with the other old wives’ tales this time around. How is they way you pick up a coffee mug really indicative of the sex of your unborn baby? They just don’t make any sense.

So, so far…the possibility of a girl seems to be winning out. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m putting up a poll (Look on the top of my right sidebar) to see what you think.

I’ve only seen this doctor once before, and it was when I was pregnant with Bronx. The practice that I go to has several doctors and there are two that I am really familiar with (the ones that delivered my sons) and they see me most of the time.

The conversation took an unexpected turn when she started talking about the pre-term labor issue and the next thing I know she was telling me that she wanted to start me on progesterone injections starting around 20 weeks.

I am not opposed to injections. I had gestational diabetes last time around and I was insulin dependent, so needles and I are not strangers. But, this is something that makes me super uneasy.

A tiny bit of it may be that I am nervous about the injections making me overdue.

Then I start thinking about how hard it was to watch Bronx struggle to breathe in that little plastic tent and how sad I felt not being able to hold him and how scared I was not knowing what would happen…and I know that if the injections could prevent all of that it would be worth it.

I think I am more uncomfortable about the fact that it seems like such a drastic step. I was really expecting to just be monitored closely and to maybe have a fetal fibronectin test before 35 weeks to see if I was at risk for another early labor. I had no idea that 20 weeks worth of extra hormones might be in my future.

And that is a little scary. Progesterone and I do not get along. At all. In fact, progesterone’s main goal in my life (besides aiding in the baby-making process) is to make me as miserable as humanly possible.

I really want to try holding off, if that is at all possible.

Something just doesn’t feel right about it.

I know, I’m probably talking crazy.

The upside to all of this is that I may be getting some extra ultrasounds towards the end of the pregnancy to monitor the baby’s growth because Bronx was (and still is) so incredibly tiny.

I’m actually excited about that part. Extra peeks at the baby are always nice.

We got another one when we did our NT screening last week, and the baby was bouncing all over the place and looking right at us. She should have probably printed a picture then, but the ultrasound tech had to shake my belly to get the baby to turn so she could get the measurements of the back of the neck, so when she got around to actually printing out the pictures we got some nice shots of the baby…just from behind.

I was googling progesterone injections the other day because some unexpected things came up at my last doctor’s appointment. More on that later…

Anyways, I found a discussion forum on progesterone injections and there were several moms talking about how “crunchy” they were.

It seemed odd that so many women were referring to themselves with such an unflattering adjective. I had no idea what they were talking about. Crunchy is for crackers, not people.

I was a little weirded out. And I had to make damn sure that I wasn’t “crunchy”. After all, what would my husband think if he found out he married a “crunchy”girl? It just sounds strange.

So, I googled it. I don’t know what I would do without that blessed search engine. How did mankind ever survive without it?

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. I am NOT “crunchy”.

“Crunchy” moms follow an all-natural lifestyle. All organic, chemical free, sew your own clothes, hippie kind of life. There is nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but I am the total opposite of that.

-We watch television. The kids are exposed to a fair amount of Nick Jr. during the day (hey, it’s like preschool on T.V. according to their ads) and I don’t ever feel bad about it. Sometimes Mommy needs to get a load of laundry done.

-I use bleach to clean my whites and my toilets. I use Lysol wipes on every hard surface in my house and I have an exterminator spray for icky bugs every three months. I have a whole (locked) cabinet under my sink filled with household cleaners. Amazingly, even with all the chemicals around, none of my kids are mutants.

-Home birthing is not something I would ever want to do. Here’s hoping that the hospital gets my epidural to me earlier this time.

-My kids get vaccinated. On schedule. Because we don’t like the mumps. Or any other gross diseases.

-I use disposable diapers. I clean quite enough poop out of my not-quite-potty-trained three year-old’s underpants. The thought of having to rinse out poopy diapers too makes me want to cringe.

-I think co-sleeping is insane. As a mom, I never get enough sleep. Letting our kids sleep with us would just rob us of the precious few hours of slumber that we actually do get. I’m not willing to give that up. When we bring home a baby, we do the by-the-bed bassinet thing for two or three months. That is closest we will ever come to co-sleeping. After that, it’s in the crib for a crash course in self-soothing. (It works, both my kids sleep all night long – cue the Lionel Richie song.)

-I drive a van. You cannot fit three car seats in the back of a Prius.

-I could never home-school. I love my kids, but sending them off for a few hours every day sounds like the just the vacation that I’ve been desperate for. Plus, they need to learn how to socialize with someone other than me.

-I love my Baby Bjorn, but my stroller is really awesome too.

-I do breastfeed and I have let both of my sons self-wean (they both did at a year). Although, I will admit that if they continued past that I would have cut them off from the mommy milk bar before the age of 2.

-We have a ton of toys that are noisy and use batteries. And there is freaking plastic stuff all over my house. (All my bottles and pacifiers and sippys are BPA-free though.)

-I’m a total carnivore. Leave the plants for the rabbits.

I know that I can’t possibly be alone in this. Please tell me that someone out there is a Mushy Mommy just like me!

(Just don’t tell my hubby he married a “mushy” girl because I’m pretty sure it sounds just as bad as “crunchy”. Maybe worse.)

He was weighed at his doctor’s appointment last week and he barely tipped the scales at 13 lbs 12 oz.

That was also his exact weight 2 months ago at his 10 month checkup.

In fact, Bronx actually hit the 13 pound mark at 6 months of age. He’s only gained 12 ounces since then and in the last two months, he hasn’t gained an ounce.

And, yes. We do feed him.

The kid eats. He eats more than his three year-old brother. This is definitely not a feeding issue.

The average weight of a year old infant is around 22 pounds. Needless to say, the doctor emphasized that Bronx’s weight was “not normal” and that he wanted to run some tests.

So, Bronx spent his first birthday at the hospital lab. Not fun. Especially the part that involved drawing a ridiculously large amount of blood from someone so tiny.

I wasn’t too worried about the whole situation, until Dr. Google gave me a laundry list of possible conditions that could be attributed to a lack of weight gain, with the worst being cystic fibrosis, heart disease, celiac disease, or an endocrine disorder.

I started to get a little worried after that. The doctor did imply that something had to be wrong and I started to think that maybe it was worse than just a really fast metabolism.

Until the doctor’s office called and told me that the zillions of tests that they ran all came back normal.

So, I’m officially raising a smurf. I’m not complaining. He’s a lot easier to carry around this way.

Plus, he’s taking forever to grow out of anything.

And if someone from Guinness is reading this…we’d love to win a world-record.

This book covers every medical condition I’ve ever heard of and some that I haven’t. It even has a section on pyloric stenosis (which really made me wish I had had this back when Bronx was having his tummy troubles).

Each section in the book covers a different medical condition or disorder and has questions answered by specialists. There is an index for quick reference and the topics are divided into two catergories: newborn/infant and child/adolecent. (Athough, the section on Umbilical Cord Stump Inflammation is in the child/adolescent area of the book, which is confusing to me).

As a soon-to-be mother of three with many years of doctor’s visits in my future, I know that this book will be a useful reference tool. Especially since I’m too busy changing diapers right now to find the time for med school.